Suspend Your Disbelief

Posts Tagged ‘short story month’

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Yes, Virginia, Some Agents DO Love Short Stories: a guest post by Julie Barer

by Celeste Ng

Editor’s note: As part of our Short Story Month celebrations, we’re delighted to present this guest post by agent Julie Barer of Barer Literary. I once dated a man who shared my taste in fiction almost completely. Diehard fan of the often overlooked Canadian writer Robertson Davies? Check. Particularly drawn to novels that played with genre like Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go and Susannah Clarke’s Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell? Another check. Books that seemed written for young adults but read just as well for grownups, like Suzanne Collins’s Hunger Games Trilogy? Triple points. As you can imagine, this […]


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Get Writing: Resurrecting Elvis

by Celeste Ng

This week’s challenge: take a tabloid headline—the wackier, the better—and write a short story taking the headline completely seriously. For example, you might check the Weekly World News‘s website or search for images of its front page (as it’s sadly no longer being printed). Or you might sift through the News of the Weird or the pages of the National Enquirer for inspiration, or spend some quality time perusing publications in the grocery-store checkout line. (Hey, it’s research!) Here are a couple more to get you started: But remember, your story should treat the headline seriously. Often, tabloid stories get […]


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Curl Up with Some Good Flash Fiction: Stories by Tara L. Masih

by Anne Stameshkin

Short Story Month wouldn’t be complete without some first-rate flash fiction. This morning, enjoy the following selections by Tara L. Masih, editor of The Rose Metal Press Field Guide to Writing Flash Fiction and author of the excellent collection Where the Dog Star Never Glows (Press 53, 2010) and the flash fiction chapbooks Fragile Skins and Tall Grasses. Below are first-line teasers; click on each story title to read (or listen to) the rest. “Dodging Frogs on Blackbird Road,” via Electric Flash (page 25 of the PDF) Never mind hindsight . . . after stretching and straining our bodies in […]


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This Week in Shorts

by Celeste Ng

Here’s another helping of short-story related news for this week: Listen: BookCourt in Brooklyn presents two reading from new collections: Monday, May 16th, at 7:00 pm: Danzy Senna, from You Are Free Tuesday, May 17th, at 7:00 pm: Donald Moss David Abrahms of The Quivering Pen will be doing daily giveaways of short story collections the week of May 16—i.e., this coming week. He writes: “Along with the giveaways, I’ve invited each of the authors to contribute their thoughts about the short story–why they matter, why they’ll survive, and why readers should never dismiss them with a wave of the […]


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Stories We Love: "Mollusks"

“Trying to be weird and strange isn’t as interesting as coming up with a reason for it,” Arthur Bradford says of his 2001 short story collection, Dogwalker, in an interview with Robert Birnbaum. Labeling Bradford’s work “weird” may be a bit of an understatement, given stories that include a woman giving birth to a glowing frog, a family of cat-faced carnival workers, a human/canine love affair, and all manner of mutant dogs: talking, three-legged, Siamese triplets, born with furry flippers instead of legs, etc. But Bradford makes the strange seem not only usual, but welcome and beautiful. Bradford’s weirdness is […]


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Stories We Love: "The Lottery"

I don’t remember the first time I read “The Lottery” by Shirley Jackson. It seems I’ve been haunted by that story forever: the dusty June center of town where the annual lottery is held, in my imagination a composition of all the Vermont towns I’ve lived in, and the blind cruelty of the populace a reflection of blind cruelty everywhere. The idea of “The Lottery” is that people can turn on one another for no reason other than that it’s what everyone else is doing, that we follow the crowd even when the request or demand that’s being made is […]


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Stories We Love: Impossible Things

by Charlotte Boulay

A short story collection I re-read at least once a year is Connie Willis’s Impossible Things. It begins with the obligatory Lewis Carroll epigraph, but then adds another from Auden: “Nothing can save us that is possible.” One of Connie Willis’s overarching themes is communication: what do we say to each other and, of those conversations, what do we actually understand? One story follows a NASA negotiator and a woman renting him a few square feet in a Japanese apartment as they try to figure out if the friendly aliens who’ve just arrived at Earth are trying to set up […]


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Choosing the PEN/O. Henry Prize Stories: a guest post by Laura Furman

by Celeste Ng

Editor’s note: As part of our continuing celebration of Short Story Month, we’re delighted to present a guest post by Laura Furman, editor of the PEN/O. Henry Prize Stories. Each year, I choose the twenty stories to be included in The PEN/O. Henry Prize Stories. Once I’ve gathered them in a manuscript without attribution of authorship or publication, I send the stories to the three jurors of the year. They in turn read them and, without consulting either me or each other, pick an individual favorite and write about it. The emphasis in this part of the book’s life is […]


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Curl Up with a Good Story: “The Old Economy Husband,” by Lesley Dormen

by Anne Stameshkin

I first read “The Old Economy Husband” in the Atlantic Monthly, back when they published fiction every month and I subscribed. But I’d been thinking about canceling; I was an editorial assistant in Manhattan, and I was in no mood for what I called “stories about rich people.” It was two months after 9/11. I didn’t sit down on the subway because I felt safer near the door. This story about rich people–which wasn’t, it turned out, about rich people–made me miss my stop and renew my subscription. Here’s an excerpt: It was that summer, the summer we were fifty […]


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Participating in Short Story Month? Join the Conversation!

by Celeste Ng

Are you tweeting or posting on Facebook about Short Story Month? Here’s how to connect with others doing the same: On Twitter, use the hashtag #ssm2011 On Facebook, join the Facebook Event SSM 2011 Thanks to Matt Bell for the great idea. Let us know: what stories have you been reading? Writing? Sharing? And stay tuned to FWR in the coming weeks for more great story-related content, including a guest post by the aforementioned Matt Bell.




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